Category: Short Stories

Wait! I hear them talking again. They stop whenever I go downstairs, which I do rarely these days, especially after the recent trip.

Hang on. I can’t even hear myself talk. How can I tell you my story?

They are yelling now. If you hear them over my voice – I have shut the door against any sound seeping upstairs into the room, but if you do understand what they say, I beg you, ignore them. Please. Please, don’t listen to them.

As I was saying…

“No, Ma. I am not talking to anyone. What do you want?”. See, my mum is trying to be as loud as my grandma used to be. She can try all she wants, but she can never be the grand old lady.

About my grandma? She was some lady. I have so many tales to tell you. She gave me this box. Wait. She first took me into her room, closed the door behind us and whispered to me, “Vinita, my dear, this box is precious. My grandma gave this to me, and now, this is yours. There is a mirror inside, but only those with a pure heart can see it, see anything in it. Only the chosen ones. No one in our family is good enough to see the mirror, I am sorry but that’s the truth.”

If you are wondering, I brought the box to Australia! Yes, I wrapped my jeans around it. During the whole time in the flight, I kept thinking of the box and the magic mirror.

I am feeling a bit sleepy. I promise I will finish the story when I am up, don’t panic. Ok?

Meanwhile, if you hear the whispers from the stairways, or the loud calls of my name, ignore and ignore, while I try to lie down a little.

 

Oopsie-daisy. Did I keep you for long? Are you still with me? At any rate, I hope you didn’t pay attention to the voices. I am telling you the story. Stay with me.

As I was saying, when the customs lady asked us why we didn’t tick the box for wooden articles, I worried about my little wooden box – the one with the mirror inside. I told her, I had brought this box as a gift from my grandma. I didn’t tell her about the magical mirror. Not telling the truth – is that a lie or half-a-truth? You decide. The best part? The lady believed it! I was nervous. What if she spotted the mirror inside, especially with my parents watching. I saw her open the box right in front of me. She acted as if she didn’t see anything inside. Wow! She does not have a good soul. As soon as she placed the box at the counter, I grabbed it open to check. There it was. Our precious mirror. I saw my grandma’s face blinking and smiling as I blinked and smiled.

I feel embarrassed. Tell me the truth. No half-truths or lies. While I was asleep, did you hear anything? Did you hear my dad repeat those big words I heard at the hospital? What’s going on? They are not telling me anything.

As I was saying…

Omer found himself all over social media ever since ABC beamed, “A Turkish engineer unearths rare Islamic mosaic in Brisbane”. The mad frenzy didn’t abate even after weeks. It happened on a typical day at Odyssey Constructions when Omer got ready to dig tunnels, drill pipes and drive machinery around the CBD site. The site to be cleared up to rise a fifty-storey building after demolishing a hundred year old house.

He rang Nate, the ABC journalist, who had by then become a friend. “Did you need to call me a ‘Turkish Engineer’? I feel like I have been in Australia forever”.

“Nah, Omer, I get it. But you know how it works.”

“Madness. Ever since I grabbed that crooked old stone plate out of a rusted old trunk. I hope it is worth something. Anyways, they snatched it from me. And you guys keep pestering me for more information. Madness”.

“Omer, there is something about the art work – the colour patterns you see in Turkish lamps. They are saying it must be a few centuries-old. But how did it travel all the way to Australia. Also, why was it buried under the backyard of this particular house. Do you know who lived there ? Back in the day, the grandfather of Mr. Rob Satter, the notorious Queensland MP who can’t shut up about immigration. Yeah, mate. the same Mr. Satter. And would he prefer any connection with a Mediterranean relic – he almost punched me last month when I gently probed him of his ancestry”.

“Is he Turkish?”

“Not sure, Omer. Well, he claims to be a 100% Aussie.”

“I am sure there is a Turkish connection. To the stone, I mean. I remember similar tiles with patterns from my childhood in my grandmother’s village. She told me stories – mostly she made up stories out of images painted in the tiles. Moral tiles. Moral tales, I mean. I miss her”.

“Wait. Maybe you can guess the story of this mosaic. I took a high resolution picture. It is broken of course, but you can see the painting clearly. A tall old man standing up, a cat stretching up in two legs, watching him, and several mice surrounding them. What does it mean, Omer?”

“Nate, mate. Im not a historian. I drill holes. You are the journalist. You said some researchers are onto it”. They chatted for a while.

Omer saw no point. He got back to his routine of drilling and draught beer. But his sleep was broken. The other night he felt he heard something. A tall man stood in the doorway, holding a crushed hat under his arm, combing his long, black hair. He took out something from a bag that appeared heavy for his hands. He carried it to Omer, walking with majesty. Grandfather?

No, this is not real. Omer reminded himself he had fought away those childhood nightmares. “Close your eyes and imagine walking into the cave I told you about, Omer”, his grandmother used to say. For a while he grew up around such imagined rivers and caves. And then she was gone one day, and he grew up to be a serious person.

When he woke up he saw a few missed calls from Nate.

“Omer, its gone mate. The mosaic was reported stolen yesterday. DIdn’t you say it was heavy?”

Nate went on without waiting for an answer. “It is as if the stone never existed. Mr. Satter should be relieved”.

That was a year ago. While Nate kept digging for a connection to Mr. Satter’s ancestors, Omer quietly returned to his family in Istanbul and joined a construction company.

Once in a while, the image of the mural would flash in his mind. Perhaps his grandmother would have cracked the puzzle. She would have weaved a nice story connecting the old man and the cat and mice. After all, isn’t that what grand mothers do?

Omer was surprised when Nate called.

“How did you get my number?”

“Omer, I found something!”

“The stone thingy, what you call that? Mural mosaic?”

“No, mate.”

“The connection to Mr. Satter’s ancestory?”

“Yeah, no. not yet. I’m close. One day, I will. “

“Oh. what did you find then?”

“The puzzle. The story in the painting. This might sound like what your grandmother would narrate. Yesterday I walked into this cafe in Eagle street, and this wooden sculpture greeted me. The exact same shape of the mural art work. The Indian guy who runs the cafe was intrigued by my curiosity. He said this depicts an ancient tale. The old man, eyes closed, is praying hard, the cat is mimicking and mocking the old man, the mice. And they are laughing at the cat which is no longer a threat. He then gave me a philosophy lesson too. That, life is a joke.

Omer chuckled to himself. Closed his eyes, said a quiet prayer, as if whispering to his long gone grandmother, and dissolved into an unbroken sleep.

Papers on his desk bristled in the morning gust. The long ray gleamed on the words of the first page of his manuscript. “Omer’s Odyssey”

“This is the story of Omer, the persecuted 18th century artist who belonged to the people of Istanbul, yet rebelled against kings and religious leaders and fanatical followers. Evicted from his village, imprisoned in a cave, he kept making art, fusing broken pebbles with lime, painting with his blood. He cried out a curse: The great river Bosporus will flood one day, flushing this mural out, the stone and the story will swim about for a while. It will lay buried in the depths, until one day, it will be discovered by a boy named Omer, and he will carry it to the far ends of the world. It will belong to the world, it will capture people’s hearts, only for it will be hidden and buried again, to be discovered again, only to be lost and hidden and buried again, and to be found again by boy named Omer…..”

Drishti slept badly and woke before the weak winter sunlight would meander about her Heidelberg University hostel. Instead of waiting for her alarm, she got up, showered, dressed, drank a cup of black coffee she barely got used to, and packed her suitcase. She waited for the call from her travel agent.

She had decided the previous night to do the inevitable, to return to India for the Christmas break, a decision that would mean a break in her research work, money lost on unnecessary travel, mostly of the swallowing of her pride when she goes back to her aunt. Why would you remain at this time of the year alone in that bone-chilling place. Come back home and return to German after the new year break. Drishti would bite her aunt every time she went German. But last night, she let her have it the way her tongue allowed.

The aunt was right after all. Drishti saw how everyone at the university, anyone she knew went home for Christmas. Even Sandra Bicker, her mentor who was going to take her to the Mercedes-Benz museum for design workshops, had change of plans. That she would choose Yoga Vacations in Lakshadweep was a surprise. Everyone seemed to be following the moon, sailing eastwards, leaving her alone in this beautiful, historic city flooded with visitors from all planets. The Mannheimer strasse filled up and the Christmas market at MarktPlaz was a carnival.

Through the window, she would watch the early morning joggers along the Neckar. She had fewer acquaintances outside the university, and she felt embarrassed about her German (the language, of course). All this while, she got as far as “bitte” and “danke schon” and a smattering of syllables wrapped with her smile.

Through the window she also got used to watching a stranger, an old man on a torn leather jacket, smoking many times a day, gripping the cigarette with his shivering left hand. She once spotted the man at the Aldi. She smiled but immediately admonished herself. He saw through her as if in a trance.

She was getting used to the silence. Outside of the class, she remained focussed on her research, submerged in bed and books. She went out mostly for the hot nutella-topped pancakes at the Hauptbanhof. Her taste buds lead her to the Indian restaurant near the castle and she lapped up the daal soup. She wouldn’t go again, after the lady told her, “Here we don’t serve water on the table. Order a bottle if you need. Okay?”

She missed home, yet she was hopeful in staying put. But she was not ready when the hostel concierge reminded her about reduced services during Christmas. The petite girl handed out a card with a smile, “This is the emergency contact number in case the building is on fire. If unattended, please leave a message. Someone will call you back immediately after Christmas”.

Any other chance of surviving the lonely winter break in Germany? Shy and inert, she had declined Shreya’s invitation to join her on a week long trip to Salzburg. She decided she would finish Papillon in one go, to get buried in more books. After the first fifty pages, she got depressed by the hero’s prospect at the solitary Columbian prison. She promised to return to the pages of his escape after the new year. Not now, not in this state of mind.

She had one final option. She searched the bags, the shelf, the other suitcase. Profound was her relief when she stumbled upon the notebook. She glanced through the names and numbers and searched for “Shyam uncle”. Aunt had spoken highly of her cousin settled in Dresden. It would be a five-hour train journey. Drishti schemed to bribe him and his family with the last bottle of aunt’s home-made lemon pickles. Maybe they would take her in during the holidays.

She rang him, and in the first few seconds it was clear she need not bother booking train tickets. “No problem, uncle. Happy New Year!”

Outside, the silence was total. The stranger-smoker-man-friend arrived. As he smoked away his morning blues, she felt his presence. His company.

The day went on. The bridge on the river was buzzing with cars. A big beast of a bird spread its wings, descending to the waters. The lights and reflections of the cars and the boats and the birds traced lines on her glass-top table, merging and blurring. A moment so pure it didn’t slide into a meaning.

When she opened the window, the phone rang, its ignored monotones regressing to the buzz outside.

Drishti returned to Papillon.

Madhu was in the class room. The desk had scratches and markings everywhere. He sat, slouching a bit and looked up. The wooden beams crisscrossing the large, ninth standard A section class room had markings, scratchings and writings. They were not Thirukurals. Lewd and rusty things said by fourteen year old boys over the years. How did they get up there ? Did they scratch on it before it got erected?

Vignesh came back from the playground. He looked and breathed tired. He smelled too.

“Move aside, da! I have to complete it before the mad man comes”, he said. “Did you finish?”

“Oh, I know. You would have finished already!”, he kept charging at Madhu without waiting for a reply.

He then jumped over Madhu’s back and landed on the bench. He put his hand under the table and unearthed folded foils of white sheets. His style. He didn’t like notebooks like the rest of them. He wrote in pieces of paper and clipped them, stapled them, sometimes even knitted them with twine threads. He was messy.

Madhu checked the blackboard. The blackness brought about by the cleaners in the morning was long gone. It was grey. The white chalks and multiple erasing in the morning class by the physics teacher Vanan. Chalks. Well, chalks were all over the place. Small, rounded missiles they became at the hands of the always-angry teachers.

Vanan, the large-teeth fellow, carried his cane always and wrote his equations with a screeching sound that swallowed all the silence of the class of hundred and five boys, all stunned by his whirling sound of whiplash.

He liked to pick up on Vignesh, his favourite. He would ask the trickiest of questions at the most unexpected times – when Vignesh dozed off for a mere millionth of a second.

“Sir! Sir! Sorry Sir!…”.

Whip. Whip.

“What is Newton’s second law of motion?”

“Sir! Sir! I don’t know, Sir! Please sir!”.

Whip. Whack.

“Just coming to school every day, well dressed, filling your stomach, and like a donkey, carrying bag full of books, but not opening them, ever”. Vanan’s caustic remarks were directed at the whole class. It was a prefix to the violent act that followed.

Taking in a long breath after uttering each phrase, swinging his cane up in the air, pausing a moment for pure theatre, swinging it down while breathing out and lurching towards the poor boy, he lashed at his buttocks at an angle tangent to the convex, tender flesh.

Vanan laughed like a yoga guru and a warrior, all in one.

“Sir………r!”

Vignesh was more moaning than pleading. The last sound of the afternoon physics class.

It was quiet ever since. The whole class wrote “F=ma” one thousand times as an imposition, in white sheets, notebooks and soiled scraps.

It was Newton’s law but Vanan’s regime.